Zacarias Moussaoui

Zacarias Moussaoui (30 May 1968-), also known as Abu Khaled al-Sahrawi, was a member of al-Qaeda from France who was one of the people arrested by the United States for planning terrorism around 9/11.

Biography
Zacarias Moussaoui was born on 30 May 1968 in St. Jean de Luz, Pyrenees-Atlantiques, France to a Muslim family from Morocco. His mother married a stranger when she was 14 in Morocco and moved to France when he was born. Although there was no religious education in the family, they had to deal with racism. On one occasion, his teenage sweetheart's father warned him off because he was an Arab, and Moussaoui enrolled in the British college of South Bank University in 1993. He graduated in 1995 and attended the Brixton Mosque, where he met shoe bomber Richard Reid and extremist imam Abu Hamza al-Masri. In 1996 French authorities began to monitor him when he met with Islamist extremists, and in 1998 he was trained in the Khalden training camp of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in Afghanistan. In 2000, he was given $35,000 by Jemaah Islamiyah leader Riduan Ismauddin, and from February to May 2001, he trained at the airman flight school in Norman, Oklahoma. Despite 57 hours of flight lessons, he failed all of them and was not allowed to fly solo. Ramzi bin al-Shibh later wired him $14,000 to take flight lessons in Eagan, Minnesota. His flight instructor Clarence Prevost contacted the FBI after he became suspicious of Moussaoui - he used the right jargon in nonsensical sentences, sought simulator time for a Boeing while he lacked basic plane knowledge, and misunderstood the plane's system despite reading through the Boeing 740 manual.

On 16 August 2001, Moussaoui was arrested by FBI agent Harry Samit and charged with immigration violation. He was imprisoned, but the failure of the FBI to ask fellow attempted plane hijacker Ahmed Ressam about Moussaoui got rid of the chance that they had to derail the 9/11 attacks on 11 September 2001. In 2005 he pleaded guilty to all charges presented against him, and he served a life sentence at Florence ADX Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado.